This month we tried a new restaurant in Leicester — Cinnamon, formerly Timo Italian on Stoneygate Road. They had a special opening offer of 30% off the bill for the first seven days, so we thought we’d give it a try.

Allandale Road is a classy part of Leicester, with some great restaurants and bars, as well as plenty of free parking, so it’s an ideal location for this type of venue. Cinnamon also has a sister restaurant in Market Harborough, which we’ve visited previously.

The restaurant has had a full refit and fits in well with the area. We were greeted by one of the waiters and shown to our window table. To be honest, we did have to wait a while for someone to take our drinks order. We were expecting draught Kingfisher, but apparently, they hadn’t had time to get the pump installed, so we ended up with a mixture of warm and cold large bottles of Kingfisher.

We ordered poppadom’s and pickles to start. Unfortunately, the poppadom’s were soft, but by this point we were very hungry and didn’t want to wait to send them back. To their credit, they were taken off the bill.

For our mains, we ordered Honey Badami, Katmandu, Naaga Madras and two Special Mix Biryanis. The Biryani was a little different from what we were used to and, unfortunately, it didn’t really go down with the guys.

We also had Pineapple Rice, Plain Rice, Red Onion Garlic Chilli Naan and Peshwari Naan.

We had a chat with the owner during the evening, and he gave us some background on the restaurant and its history. He was clearly keen to make sure we were happy and worked hard to look after us.

In summary, we all agreed that we had probably gone too early. The restaurant is still finding its feet, and there were clearly a few things that needed to be sorted out, particularly the staffing and the draught beer.

We’ll return in a few weeks, once things have settled and the team is fully up to speed. The restaurant still reflects its Italian heritage, from the cutlery to the lasagne on the menu—an unusual touch for an Indian restaurant!

Worth a visit — but I’d leave it a few weeks for them to get everything up and running properly.